[Gutenberg 45604] • The Lives of the Saints, Volume 02 (of 16): February

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The Lives of the Saints, which I have begun, is an undertaking, of whose difficulty few can have any idea. Let it be remembered, that there were Saints in every century, for eighteen hundred years; that their Acts are interwoven with the profane history of their times, and that the history, not of one nation only, but of almost every nation under the sun; that the records of these lives are sometimes fragmentary, sometimes mere hints to be culled out of secular history; that authentic records have sometimes suffered interpolation, and that some records are forgeries; that the profane history with which the lives of the Saints is mixed up is often dark and hard to be read; and then some idea may be formed of the difficulty of this undertaking.

After having had to free the Acts of a martyr from a late accretion of fable, and to decide whether the passion took place under—say Decius or Diocletian, Claudius the Elder, or Claudius the younger,—the writer of a hagiology is hurried into Byzantine politics, and has to collect the thread of a saintly confessor's life from the tangle of political and ecclesiastical intrigue, in that chaotic period when emperors rose and fell, and patriarchs succeeded each other with bewildering rapidity. And thence he is, by a step, landed in the romance world of Irish hagiology, where the footing is as insecure as on the dark bogs of the Emerald Isle. Thence he strides into the midst of the wreck of Charlemagne's empire, to gather among the splinters of history a few poor mean notices of those holy ones living then, whose names have survived, but whose acts are all but lost. And then the scene changes, and he treads the cool cloister of a mediæval abbey, to glean materials for a memoir of some peaceful recluse, which may reflect the crystalline purity of the life without being wholly colourless of incident.

And then, maybe, he has to stand in the glare of the great conflagration of the sixteenth century, and mark some pure soul passing unscathed through the fire, like the lamp in Abraham's vision.

That one man can do justice to this task is not to be expected. When Bellarmine heard of the undertaking of Rosweydus, he asked "What is this man's age? does he expect to live two hundred years?" But for the work of the Bollandists, it would have been an impossibility for me to undertake this task. But even with this great storehouse open, the work to be got through is enormous. Bollandus began January with two folios in double columns, close print, of 1200 pages each. As he and his coadjutors proceeded, fresh materials came in, and February occupies three volumes. May swelled into seven folios, September into eight, and October into ten. It was begun in 1643, and the fifty-seventh volume appeared in 1861.

The labour of reading, digesting, and selecting from this library is enormous. With so much material it is hard to decide what to omit, but such a decision must be made, for the two volumes of January have to be crushed into one, not a tenth of the size of one of Bollandus, and the ten volumes for October must suffer compression to an hundredth degree, so as to occupy the same dimensions. I had two courses open to me. One to give a brief outline, bare of incident, of the life of every Saint; the other to diminish the number of lives, and present them to the reader in greater fulness, and with some colour. I have adopted this latter course, but I have omitted no Saint of great historical interest. I have been compelled to put aside a great number of lesser known saintly religious, whose eventless lives flowed uniformly in prayer, vigil, and mortification.

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